


Hold Tight

by Starlithorizon



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Brazil, F/M, Kinda?, like how do i tag this one?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-19
Updated: 2014-03-19
Packaged: 2018-01-16 06:27:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1335433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starlithorizon/pseuds/Starlithorizon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the story of a pillar of the community, of a woman who'd lived and loved and lost before she became Old Woman Josie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hold Tight

**Author's Note:**

> I posted this on my [tumblr](http://litbythestars.tumblr.com) last week after holding onto it for a while. It's really just an extended headcanon for Old Woman Josie. I'm just always worried about Josie lately.

She had just been called Josie once, long ago. Before that, she had been Josephina, loosely named after the beautiful wife of Napoleon Bonaparte. Once, she had even been young. She had been a child with obsidian ringlets and fine brown skin so much like her mother's. Her father had been dark, and joyously loud, and though he was often overlooked because of these things, he amassed a tidy little fortune. They lived in a big pink house in a very small town, with roses blooming in the garden and her mother humming in the sitting room. Her father had helped to build the house, and Josie and her sisters had helped to paint their room. They enjoyed a relatively simple life, the girls going to school, their father working in his shop, and their mother sparking ideas in the heads of the other women around town.

Shortly after the 1937 coup, Josie found a spark ignited in the back of her own head, but at the age of six it didn't really mean much. It wouldn't become a proper fire until she was older and already living in the desert. Still, it swayed so many of her choices, leading her to marry the clever young man with the fine-boned hands and skin perpetually stained with paint. Her father had wanted her to marry someone with a more stable income, but they were young, and they were in love, and he had painted her portrait in the way that so many other men painted the Virgin Mary, with gilding in her eyes and a swirling dress in the same color as the virgin's cloak.

When Josie was nineteen and Felipe was twenty, he found his big break by some rich American and they were flown up to New York. It wasn't long before Josie's face with its golden lighting and fond smile was hanging in an expensive gallery with works by Dalí and Picasso and Escher. Felipe Salvo and his pretty wife were common fixtures at all the most dazzling parties, and Josie got to wear beautiful dresses and jewels and her man on her arm. They lived in a stylish apartment on the Upper West Side, paid for by the heaps of money people had bought Felipe's works and hung them on their expensive walls.

Summer, hot and sultry and almost as thick as it had been in Brasil, eventually left and all of Josie's pretty dresses were hidden by thick coats. She wore warm hats over her curls and gloves over her hands and still her husband on her arm. The first time they saw snow in the city, Josie laughed like a child and promptly scooped some into a ball and threw it at Felipe, just as she'd seen in the movies. They spent their first Christmas as a married couple at a big, glittering party with an aluminum tree and canapes and expensive champagne. People often stared at the artist's wife with something like disdain, something like distaste, something like surprise that she was mingling with them and breathing their air, but no matter: Josephina Salvo was one of the Beautiful People, quickly becoming famous in her own right.

They went to the opera and had dinner parties and slid so seamlessly into this wealthy American life that it took the couple a year to remember that they were still waiting to become citizens of this land of glitter and gore and shining lights brilliantly masking the stink of humanity. They were naturalized in 1954, and they threw a huge party to celebrate, as anyone in their circle would have. But she and Felipe celebrated more than their new American citizenship; they had parties for every major holiday that they knew their family celebrated back home, and Felipe painted scenes from the beautiful town where they had both grown up. When he painted the pink house her father had helped build, Josie immediately hung it in the living room. She cried desperately for three nights that week, missing her family tremendously. She hadn't seen any of them since they first left the country.

There was a pit in the bottom of her stomach that ached with its hollowness most days, but it was easy to ignore. After all, they'd found their own American Dream.

* * *

In 1963, Josie felt bitter and cold. She and Felipe still had no children, and she was just resting so contentedly on his impressive work. The country was in tumult, even more than it was when they had first arrived, and what was she doing? Absolutely _nothing_. She was watching operas and going to parties and reading and forgetting to call her mother. And when Felipe went to the doctor's office for the myriad symptoms that had been so innocent on their own and come back with a diagnosis of leukemia, Josie felt bereft.

Felipe died in 1965, and Josie kept his last name and the painting of the house she had grown up in. He was buried in New York, with a sturdy granite headstone. She packed up her things, their things, an entire life, and decided that she had had more than enough of the cold. In the spring of 1966, Josephine found herself in a tiny town in the Arizona desert, given a second beginning.

It was the only beginning she'd ever really needed.

* * *

Josie was a pillar of the community, and over time, she found something peaceful and sleepy and much closer to happiness than she'd expected. She realized, nearly twenty years after her immigration, that she hadn't been properly happy since before they'd left. She remembered the tiny little house, all yellow and white and sunlit in the green of that corner of town, where she and Felipe had lived after getting married. Those had been the last walls to see real joy, but when someone laughed with real glee at a bad joke she'd made, there were a million more (shifting and mutating and warping) walls to see her happiness again.

Josie made friends, real, genuine, true friends in Night Vale who saw all the gleaming happiness they instilled in her. John Peters, a very young teacher with a very decisive interest in farming, was one of her closest friends. He and his sister, an English teacher who read a few too many political thrillers, admired the older woman. Felipe had been one of John's favorite artists, and when she discovered that he had a print of Felipe's portrait ( _She Walks the Sun_ ) in his living room, she barked out a sharp, violent laugh. It felt like a slap, and sounded like it too. It sounded like the collision of atoms, of freight trains, of galaxies, and she exploded with something joyous.

When the younger Palmer boy, Cecil, lost everything, she stepped up. He was the son she never had, the one she'd always wanted, the one who made her mourn her body. Cecil's mother, a fragile woman with eyes like ice and hands like crystal, had taken her other son and left. Cecil was a shell of the bright, gleeful young man he had been before the mirror swallowed him up and stole him. He knew so little about his own self, so little about who he was and where he had come from. He remembered his mother, and his love of radio, and the barest basics.

Sometimes, he forgot his own name.

Josie, who had long since learned and understood the importance of knowing where she had come from and who she was, took it upon herself to research his culture. She learned what he had forgotten. She told him stories of Brasil, and of the First Woman who had Survived the Great Flood. He devoured his own mythology and wore it like a badge of honor.

They had a happy life, Cecil growing up and up like a redwood tree, tall and strong and proud. How could he not? He was a child of Night Vale, trained for survival, for _living_.

Eventually, he moved out of her little house and went to college, and then spent a long while in Europe, then found a home of his own. He still doted on Josie and she still told him stories.

Her boy had grown up, and it resounded through her entire being that he had never been hers.

* * *

Josie hadn't believed in anything in a very long time. She'd grown up Catholic, of course, and had practiced for a while, but she had become disenchanted and disillusioned eventually, letting others worship what had left her behind.

She was very old when the angels revealed themselves to her. Oh, she didn't think they were angels, though they had wings and sounded like a heavenly brass section, but that was the easiest thing to call them. Much better than aliens or _Lord, I don't know_ any day.

A few were sharp and stoic, but most were childlike and sweet, chirruping and smiling and playing with everything they could get their hands on. She bought them silly clothes at the Goodwill, and most of them wore them. The black angel favored a sweatshirt that read _Defend the Den, '98_ across the chest.

She had finished raising Cecil, and she had loved him. She still did, of course. But these angels, these mystic and strange beings obsessed with the sun and that odd fly salesman, these angels were _hers_. They had chosen her, Old Woman Josie, and for the first time she knew that it was because she was important and necessary in her own right.

"If I fall," she intoned shortly after this discovery, "so too does this town."

She was a monument, a forever thing, a fixed point in the universe. And, with her simple existence, so was Night Vale.

**Author's Note:**

> This was un-beta'd. My knowledge on Brazil is pretty limited to what I found on Wikipedia. If there's something overtly wrong, then please let me know so I can fix it!


End file.
